Saw cutting and road closure is underway along SW Montgomery adjacent to the Jasmine Block in SW downtown as work has begun on the double track work associated with completing the loop. I was on my way home from grocery shopping with my family last night when I noticed the familiar orange barrels accompanied by saw cut pavement.

SW Montgomery Construction

This morning, I checked in with streetcar construction updates to learn the timeline on this work. According to the update, work should be completed by September 28th, just in time for fall term to begin at PSU with the only major headache occurring from September 15th to 21st where service will be suspended from SW Clay to the South Waterfront. Shuttles will serve this stretch while new switches are installed.

Since I live in this area, I should be able to provide some updates with photos as work progresses. Chris posted some material on this section last November which provides some critical background on why this work is occurring and just how it will look once work is completed.

I think that misses the point of streetcar, at least as we have deployed it here in Portland. Streetcar is transit that emphasizes short trips.

That’s very much in line with the ‘Healthy Connected City’ plank of the Portland Plan, which envisions Portland as a city of corridors and centers that provide most of the daily needs of citizens within an easy walking or biking distance. The development pattern that streetcar incentivizes, and then serves, very much supports this vision.

The other point that’s missed is that streetcar exists in the context of a larger transit system. Certainly you could not and should not build a transit system entirely of mixed-operation streetcars.

In Portland, the regional transit system has a hierarchy of three levels of service:

1) Local Bus Service

2) Frequent Service Lines (bus)

3) High Capacity Transit (LRT, Commuter Rail, future BRT)

Streetcar wouldn’t make any sense if there were not the other options to move from the streetcar districts to other places (there are lots of intersections between streetcar and the HCT and frequent service lines).

And I would note that from my home, I have the option of either streetcar or a frequent service bus to get downtown (roughly covering opposite right angles of a rectangle) and they take about the same time. Streetcar is really not slower than a bus in a dense urban environment.

There’s also been some debate about where streetcar falls in this service hierarchy. Some of our planning documents lump it in the Frequent Service category, and there’s some logic to that as the operating costs and other characteristics are similar. But I think mixed-operating streetcar is really in a category by itself that I’d be inclined to label as “High Capacity Local Service“.

Some of the criticism of the DC streetcar has been focused on replacing bus service. We have largely not done that with streetcar in Portland, it’s been complimentary to the existing bus lines (some of which have been reconfigured slightly to take advantage of this). Replacing a purely local bus might work with streetcar, but probably not if the bus operated over a much longer route. Replacing higher classifications of transit service with mixed-operation streetcars would likely be problematic. Portland will probably be faced with this temptation as we expand the streetcar network. I hope we will choose carefully and wisely.

The question has also been raised about how “future-proof” these streetcar investments are? I would suggest that the future opportunity is to convert these lines to dedicated right-of-way by removing auto use from the alignments. The VMT goals in Portland’s Climate Action Plan would hint in that direction.

So I rise today not in support of slow transit, but in support of short-trip transit!

It might be masked a bit by Rose Festival, but Portland Streetcar hit an important milestone today!

The “CL” line (the “loop” to the east side) is now running at the same headways as the “NS” line on the west side (about 4 minute shorter headways at peak service).

The important benefit of matching the headways is that in the shared route portion of both lines (10th and 11th from Market to Lovejoy), we can interleave the vehicles evenly, resulting in effectively doubled frequency for customers on that part of the system (7 minutes at peak).

In a little over a year when we “close the loop”, this double-frequency zone will extend all the way from South Waterfront to the Pearl.

It just keeps getting better! BTW – for the skeptics, ridership on the CL line has approximately doubled since it opened, and overall system ridership is very close the 16,000 riders/day on weekdays.